The Magic of Holy Places

Encountering a religion other than your own can lead you to the heart of a culture in a way nothing else can. Our correspondents report on the ties that bind travel and spirituality, and recommend sacred places to see in every corner of the glob

Every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in his essay on walking, “to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.” That’s a lot of weight to put on a simple stroll around the block, and I’m not sure my every hike counts as an ascent toward the divine. Yet the journey in and the journey out, the pilgrim’s path and the tourist’s, have always been so closely related that it can be hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Just setting foot in a tradition different from your own—let alone spending a night or two with its customs or silences—can bring a wonderfully enriched sense of community and of where peace among diverse faiths may come from.

I never quite knew what all this was about until I took myself on retreat to a Catholic hermitage 19 years ago. I’m not a Catholic and certainly not a hermit, but a schoolteacher friend in California told me that, every year, he took the antsiest and most distracted of his students up to the monastery for three days and suddenly even the most hormone–driven teenagers began to fall into silence and reflection and to leave their usual restlessness behind. Whatever works for a kid ought to work for me, I thought. Almost as soon as I stepped out of my car and entered a simple room overlooking the Pacific, I felt cleaned out somehow, and returned to some better self (or nonself). In the years since, I’ve been back to the hermitage more than 50 times, usually for three days or so but sometimes for three weeks. I don’t know if I’ve become more religious, but the place has soothed, stimulated, and expanded me in ways no trip to Mauritius or Santorini has ever done.

Yet whatever elevation and calm I feel there, I’ve also come to know in monasteries in Japan, in Australia, in En­gland, where I’ve taken a breather from the workaday world. I will never forget the power of spending long periods at dawn with Orthodox Jews, praying at Jerusalem’s Western Wall, or sitting in the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus before the crowds came in—even though (or perhaps because) I’m a stranger to both Judaism and Islam.

What you feel, upon entering such sites, is not the need to define yourself in any official terms at all but the understanding that the part of you that stillness finds transcends names and distinctions. I never feel the obligation to attend services when I stay in religious communities; the silence alone, the spaciousness, the freedom from a self and a routine I know too well are all blessing and meditation enough. Religious travel is not ascetic travel: In Jerusalem, the hospice I stayed in near the Via Dolorosa was far friendlier and more comfortable than the fancy hotels I tried—and a quarter the price (see “City of God, City of Men,” April 2010). Today, the centuries–old readiness to give shelter to the wanderer has new currency, as so many of us feel so buried under data and distractions that nothing seems more luxurious than a few days’ freedom from our cell phones and computer screens.

In the pages that follow, you’ll find possibilities that open a window on what George Eliot called “the unmapped country within us.” One of the gifts of going to any site of reflection is that you quickly come to a richer understanding of someone else’s life, your own, and the common places between them. When a Tibetan has a serious conversation with a Catholic monk, so it is said, the Tibetan becomes a better Buddhist, the monk a deeper Catholic. And even if you have no religious life at all, visiting one of these places cannot fail to send you home a little different from the person who set out. Traveling to Paris or New York may give you knowledge, but journeying to one of these religious sites will give you, more wonderfully, a sense of all you don’t and may never know.